21
LIFE PRESERVER
One moment Eureka thought she was flying. The next—a violent crash into cold blue water. Her body split the surface. She clenched her eyes shut as the sea swallowed her. A wave canceled the sound of something— someone screaming above water—as the hush of ocean flowed in. Eureka heard only the crackle of fish feeding on coral, the gurgle her underwater gasp produced, and the quiet before the next colossal thrash of tide.
Her body was caught in something constricting. Her probing fingers found a nylon strap. She was too stunned to move, to wrestle free, to remember where she was. She let the ocean entomb her. Was she drowning yet? Her lungs knew no difference between being in water and being in the open air. The surface danced above, an impossible dream, an effort she couldn’t see how to make.
She felt one thing above all else: unbearable loss. But what had she lost? What did she long for so viscerally that her heart pulled like an anchor?
Diana.
The accident. The wave. She remembered.
Eureka was there again—inside the car, in the waters beneath Seven Mile Bridge. She’d been given a second chance to save her mother.
She saw everything so clearly. The clock on the dashboard read 8:09. Her cell phone drifted across the flooded front seat. Yellow-green seaweed fringed the center console. An angelfish flitted through the open window as if it were hitchhiking to the bottom. Next to her, a flowing curtain of red hair masked Diana’s face.
Eureka thrashed for the clasp of her seat belt. It dissolved into bits of debris in her hands, as if it were long-decayed. She lunged toward her mother. As soon as she reached Diana, her heart swelled with love. But her mother’s body was limp.
“Mom!”
Eureka’s heart seized. She brushed the hair from Diana’s face, longing to see her. Then Eureka stifled a scream. Where her mother’s regal features should have been, there was a black void. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.
Bright rays of something like sunlight suddenly rained down around her. Hands gripped her body. Fingers squeezed her shoulders. She was being pulled from Diana against her will. She writhed, screaming. Her savior neither heard nor cared.
She never surrendered, lashing at the hands that separated her from Diana. She would have preferred to drown. She wanted to stay in the ocean with her mother. For some reason, when she glared up at the owner of the hands, she expected to see another black and voided face.
But the boy was bathed in such bright light she could barely see him. Blond hair waved in the water. One hand reached for something above him—a long black cord stretching vertically through the sea. He grasped it hard and pulled. As Eureka soared upward through the cold glaze of sea, she realized the boy was holding on to an anchor’s thick metal chain, a lifeline to the surface.
Light suffused the ocean around him. His eyes met hers. He smiled, but it looked like he was crying.
Ander opened his mouth—and began to sing. The song was strange and otherworldly, in a language Eureka could almost understand. It was bright and high-pitched, replete with baffling scales. It sounded so familiar … almost like the chirping of a lovebird.
Her eyes opened in the solitary darkness of her bedroom. She gulped air and wiped her sweat-dampened brow. The dream song rang though her mind, a haunting sound track in the night’s stillness. She massaged her left ear, but the sound didn’t go away. It grew louder.
She rolled over to read a glowing 5:00 a.m. on her phone’s display. She realized the sound was just the song of morning birds that had infiltrated her dream and woken her. The culprits were likely speckled starlings, which migrated to Louisiana this time every fall. She wedged a pillow over her head to block out their chirping, not ready to rise and recall how thoroughly Brooks had betrayed her at the party the night before.
Eureka shot up in bed. The sound came from her window.
She threw off her blankets and hovered near the wall. The palest thread of predawn light brushed her gauzy white curtains, but she saw no shadow darkening them to indicate a person outside. She was dizzy from the dream, from how close she’d been to Diana and to Ander. She was delirious. There was no one outside her window.
In a single motion Eureka threw back the curtains. A small lime-green bird waited calmly outside on the white windowsill. He had a diamond of golden feathers on his breast and a bright red crown. His beak tapped three times on the glass.
“Polaris.” Eureka recognized Madame Blavatsky’s bird.
She slid the window up and opened the wooden shutters wider. She’d cut the screen out years ago. Icy air billowed in. She held out her hand.
Polaris hopped onto her index finger and resumed singing vibrantly. This time, Eureka was certain she heard the bird in stereo. Somehow his song came through the left ear that had heard nothing but muffled ringing for months. She realized he was trying to tell her something.
His green wings flapped against the quiet sky, propelling his body inches above her finger. He swooped closer, chirped at Eureka, then turned his body toward the street. He flapped his wings again. At last he perched on her finger to chirp a final crescendo.
“Shhh.” Eureka glanced over her shoulder at the wall her room shared with the twins’. She watched Polaris repeat the same pattern: hovering above her hand, turning toward the street, and chirping another—quieter— crescendo as he landed back on her finger.
“It’s Madame Blavatsky,” Eureka said. “She wants me to follow you.”
His chirp sounded like a
Minutes later, Eureka slipped out her front door wearing leggings, her running shoes, and a navy Windbreaker from the Salvation Army over the Sorbonne T-shirt she’d slept in. She smelled dew on the petunias and the oak branches. The sky was muddy gray.
A choir of frogs croaked under Dad’s rosemary bushes. Polaris, who’d been roosting on one of the feathery boughs, fluttered to Eureka as she closed the screen door behind her. He settled on her shoulder, momentarily nuzzled her neck. He seemed to understand that she was nervous, and embarrassed by what she was about to do.
“Let’s go.”
His flight was swift and elegant. Eureka’s body loosened, warming, as she jogged down the street to keep up. The only person she passed was a groggy newspaper-delivery kid in a red low-rider pickup, who took no notice of the girl following the bird.
When Polaris reached the end of Shady Circle, he cut behind the Guillots’ lawn and flew toward an unfenced entrance to the bayou. Eureka banked east just as he did, moving against the bayou’s current, hearing it rustle as it flowed on her right side, feeling worlds away from the sleepy row of fenced-in houses on her left.
She had never run this path of narrow, uneven terrain. In the dark hours before the day, it possessed a strange, elusive luster. She liked the way the still gloom of the night held on, trying to eclipse mist-slathered morning. She liked the way Polaris shone like a green candle in the cloud-colored sky. Even if her mission turned out to be senseless, even if she’d invented the bird’s summons at her window, Eureka convinced herself that running was better for her than lying in bed, furious with Brooks and pitying herself.
She hurdled wild ferns and camellia vines and the purple wisteria shoots that crept down from landscaped yards like tributaries trying to reach the bayou. Her shoes slapped the damp earth and her fingers tingled with cold. She lost Polaris around a hard bend in the bayou and sprinted to catch up. Her lungs burned and she
